I’ve always wanted to publish a tiny little journal like this, so I figured I’d start doing one. Unfortunately, this first attempt became 2000 words long, which is neither tiny nor little. I’m ruined. Fuck!
What I’m Makin’
My two biggest projects at any given time are writing (read: not publishing) blogs while working on videogames with my partner, Rachel. Here are some updates on those!
I started WITH ENTRAILS under the assumption that I’d be posting a lot more like this. Unfortunately, I immediately reverted to terrible habits. Things were fine! I wrote a reasonably-sized blog on Fallout, started digging through unpublished work (hundreds of articles in varying stages of completion) to finally post, and then started a thing about Half-Life and Black Mesa that currently sits at over 10,000 words and is, according to my brain, an illegible wreck. As a very tall man once said before some very unfortunate events started playing out, it is happening again. Oops.
I am an incredibly fast writer with an incredibly uncooperative brain that holds very, very little sense towards planning, organization, and scope. It’s the kind of thing where a dedicated editor would get me into shape immediately. But I’ve practically never had one – I’ve basically never had friends in the form of other writers, which is a weird/sad thought – and continue to work towards the natural predispositions of my equipment. Again, WITH ENTRAILS is a tool by which I hope to break habits like these. But there’s a lot working against me, and it can be hard to visualize a version of this whole thing that doesn’t involve me regularly chucking the equivalent of two novels every six months because the verdict came in negative. Fingers crossed I get the whole thing figured out. In the meantime, I’ll be truckin’.
Anyway, I want to get this Black Mesa article out. Primarily to prove I can function as a writer, but also because it has some pretty trenchant criticism that I’m proud to have written, in spite of the mess it became over the course of a few frenzied days. I thought about sectioning it off into three separate articles and then just posting those. Maybe. I think that’s the best option, because everything else is pretty depressing. Either way, it’s a reminder that a new environment isn’t going to fix the way I write – I fix the way I write. So after I’ve sorted this out, I’m going back to the original plan: shorter, more casual blogs (like this!) with periodic 2000-4000 word features, scoped under threat of stern warnings from the people around me and/or time in the pillory. I want to reclaim the joy of writing without the black hole of wasting away in a massive draft while thinking extremely negative thoughts about the capabilities of my brain, and writing normal-length pieces at a normal speed is the quickest route there. Who knew?(everybody knew)
On that note, here’s a small excerpt from the Black Mesa piece:
It’s hard not to see the soundtrack as a kind of floundering in the face of individual creativity. After all, there’s no perceivable “Valvian” ethos for a videogame soundtrack like there is for an approach to storytelling or level flow; there’s just Kelly Bailey with a Roland JP-8000 and a bunch of samples from Altered States. You can’t say that Valvian music is when X leads into Y and finally Z. It’s just the specific stylings of an individual guy working with the knowledge, assets, and influences available to him.
Nothing more or less than the same approach can be taken with something like Black Mesa, and though Joel Nielsen clearly has the assets and a variable amount of knowledge, it’s difficult to say he has the right mindset for the kind of work he’s substituting in; I would rather music for a Half-Life game be influenced by a bunch of weird, interesting sounds instead of something Hans Zimmer composed. And yet, Nielsen’s score undeniably completes the tone of the game – I literally cannot imagine it without him. No variation of Space Ocean, or even anything derived from a similar process or thought, feels covalent in the aftermath of Black Mesa‘s disaster sequence. This could just be the simple reality of associating music strongly with a particular scene until nothing else will ever sound right in its place, or it could be something more suggestive: that Black Mesa‘s soundtrack, far from being contradictingly and aggressively scored, perfectly complements what’s already there.
It’s perhaps the only soundtrack it could ever have, and in this way, it fits the theme of the game eloquently; an emptiness only a complete and total fullness can evoke.
I have a section dedicated to the game’s soundtrack, which is a fitting complement to Black Mesa and a clear step down from Half-Life. It’s currently the unruliest portion of the blog, so its fate is unclear; I might chop it up and find somewhere else for it. With any luck, my work will start seeing the light of day within the week, and the term Valvian will rankle you as thoroughly as it rankles my body, mind, and soul.
Hopefully I’ll start to have some cheerier reports about writing soon. On that note, I do have some good words to say about our videogame, Chiaroscuro Imago! I still haven’t written a proper post about it here – this being a running theme, I’ve barely written one anywhere. The closest I came to saying anything about the game was on Twitter:
Chiaroscuro Imago is a shivery horror game about murky secrets and stark realities. Enjoy a catered meal. Meet someone new. The phone is ringing. Learn a different language. Discover what happened to the moths.
Evocative! Tactically doesn’t tell you anything, save the vague impression that some outré and creepy things are going to happen in it. It’s a 10-15 minute horror game focused on wandering into strange conversations while unsettling things happen around you, so it’s hard to talk about much without just killing the golden goose; I’m not even sure if there is a goose, though I hope it’ll have an impact on the folks who play it.
It’s getting close to being done thanks to Rachel, who’s responsible for basically everything super cool about it: most of the major assets are finished, the writing is mostly finished – which is to say that it’s finished, sans a final rewrite and a character who speaks exclusively in pictograms, which I still have to draw – and the final area is blocked out and slowly being populated with art, atmospheric sounds, and assorted portents of malefic dread. I could talk about all this way more, but I’m trying to avoid a second 10,000 word piece, so I’ll cut my tongue off before it grows legs. I have a lot to say! I’ll try to write a blog before it’s out.
When is it out? No clue! Hopefully before the end of September or thenabouts. That’d be swell. Regardless, I hope you’ll enjoy your visit to the moth house, which is probably empty. But who knows? Loquacious little grubs share the strangest rumors.
“I don’t like to be tested. I know some woodlice that owe me a few favors, and they’re not opposed to biological violence.“
What I’m Watchin’
Not as much as I’d like to! But I have been watching a lot of film noir this week: The Third Man, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and The Killing. Men are a recurring image in these movies, much like killing. Usually the men who aren’t there happen to be dead. Balance in all the things.
I love this shit. The Third Man and The Killing are beautifully shot; the former has an excellent script and the latter feels like every actor is being forced to perform their lines at gunpoint, both of which are the core components of their respective films. In particular, The Third Man includes Orson Welles playing a character whose only scene with meaningful dialogue singlehandedly imprints itself on the entire movie. I thought he was in it way more, and he is – he hangs over the film like a ghost. But he spends comparatively little time on-screen, which has done nothing to prevent people from describing it as a movie defined by the presence of Welles. Super powerful role, but it goes without saying that the rest of the movie is great. I’m still thinking about the ending.
Loved the fractured linearity of The Killing, too. I just saw that one yesterday, so I’m still thinking about it. Likewise with The Man Who Wasn’t There, which includes some brilliant B&W photography by the Coen Brothers. It is, much like The Killing (perhaps even a Coen Brothers film), about Crimes Not Going According To Plan. Great time. I mostly want to devour every point of inspiration for the lighting and cinematography so I can vomit and shape them into all of our projects like gross clay.
I also saw the first season of the Fargo television show this month. Really enjoyed it! I’m moving on, so you’ll have to imagine the specific things I liked about it. It will suffice to say that, while we root for Molly Solverson, she is a fucked up TV cop. The scariest moment in the show is when she breaks into a suspect’s house to search for evidence. I know he killed his wife! But you don’t!! Cut it out!!!
What I’m Playin‘
Way too much to talk about. I finished Fallout, which I obviously wrote about. But I also started (and finished) Sekrio, picked up Dread Delusion again, and just recently started Bramble: The Mountain King. Too many thoughts: Sekiro was the last Soulsy FromSoftware game I hadn’t played, and easily ranks among Bloodborne, Dark Souls 2, and Demon’s Souls in my Bracket of Favored Children; Dread Delusion, which I’m a sizable 20 hours into, continues to be a game defined by its incredible writing, deft philosophy, and fascinatingly vestigial combat systems; it’s too soon to tell much about Bramble: The Mountain King save that it reminds me of Little Nightmares and that, like other games in its lineage, bad things are probably about to happen to those children.
What I’ve really been digging into is a bunch of mods. With Black Mesa on the brain since the beginning of the month, I’ve been turning towards passion projects for other games I quite like – it’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in awhile. Blood: Death Wish, Thief: The Black Parade, Doom 3: Phobos, holy crow. Death Wish and The Black Parade have already asserted themselves as major players in my brain – being iterations of their (incredible) respective games that reach the incredible height of often being wildly better than the root work – while Phobos is just a really interesting combination of Doom, Half-Life, and… Life is Strange? and Firewatch?? Still gauging how I feel about it, but the one certain factor is that nothing like this has existed or will ever exist under any other name. Hit or miss, being able to experience the videogame equivalent of new images is always a treat.
What I’m Readin’
I’ve read close to twenty books since the beginning of the year, which is a rhythm I haven’t kept in years. It’s great. The last non-fiction book I finished this month was Pulp Surrealism by Robin Walz, which is about the contributions of early 19th century popular culture to the beginnings of the surrealism movement in France. A super interesting read that deepened my love of Fantômas, who deserves his own immersive sim about killing people by inexplicably filling rooms with snakes, sand, and probably other frightful shit. Watch out for the Lord of Terror!!
As for fiction, I recently finished Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, which I quite liked! It’s a good collection of Shirley Jacksonish shivery tales that typically end right as the implicative power of the Scary Thing reaches its peak but before the nature of the thing can become clear or especially present. Some of them, like The Inn, end up feeling deflated, but stories like The Neighbor’s Courtyard manage to hit their beats deftly while still feeling eloquently unsatisfying. I think my favourite is Spiderweb, though – I like when short horror goes into the truly dreadful Shirley Jackson territory evinced by The Summer People, wherein a slow and encroaching dread just absorbs everything with no clear sense of resolution. A solid read overall!
The latest book I’ve started is Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, which I’d somehow never read before. Have you guys heard of Terry Pratchett? He’s pretty good at this sort of thing. It’s bullshit. Somebody should’ve told me.